Pai – Thailand

Finished Songkran, we decided to go to Pai, a small village at about 150km north from Chiang Mai, next with the border to Myanmar.

Actually, we didn’t really know, apparently all the tourist/travellers tend to go to Pai after Songkran and buses were full, we went with the public bus directly from Chiang Mai and we had to wait two hours for a bus and on the way back people advised us to buy the return ticket at least one day before.

The road to Pai is very nice and very winding, the first time I went there in 2014 I was hitchhiking a pickup and it was so hard not to be sick!

The village is quite small with a hippie/organic/yoga vibe, I’ve still mixed feelings about it as I like very much the natural farming all around but it’s full, FULL of tourists and shops for tourist and the stalls and restaurants serve food that is adapted to foreigners, so not really spicy (weird for a country that has spices in almost every dishes).

We didn’t book anything so we just walked around, crossed a quite unstable bamboo bridge and found ourselves in the middle of fields where we found a lovely and quite hut with a bed and a hammock for about 4$ per night.

We took a motorbike for 24 hours and it’s a good deal because everything around is outside the village and around the mountains.We went to the waterfalls but we were quite disappointed as in this moment Thailand there is no rain and the waterfalls were simply dry.There are, of course, temples all around, a giant statue of Buddha, a Chinese village, a lake (still dry) and a canyon.
At the end, despite some distress, it was worth seeing the area, it is calm and relaxing, nature is beautiful and it’s nice to get lost in the countryside.